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Gone Girl (2014) Undergraduate Dissertation Trabajo Fin de Grado “Nick Loved a Girl I Was Pretending to Be: ‘Cool Girl’”: Narration and Ideology in David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) Author María Alejandra Suárez Coro Supervisor María del Mar Azcona Montoliu FACULTY OF ARTS 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 2. SUSAN FALUDI AND THE “BACKLASH AGAINST INDEPENDENT WOMEN” .......................................................................................................................................... 3 3. GONE GIRL ................................................................................................................. 9 3.1. “HE-SAID-SHE-SAID” NARRATION ................................................................... 9 3.2. FROM “COOL GIRL” TO “COMPLETE PSYCHOPATH” ................................. 19 4. CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................... 27 5. WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 29 6. FILMS CITED ............................................................................................................ 31 1. INTRODUCTION Gone Girl, based on the book of the same title written by Gillian Flynn and published in 2012, was directed by David Fincher and released at the New York Film Festival in 2014. Starring Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne and Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, the film was marketed as a thriller about Amy’s disappearance at the hands of her unfaithful husband. Her disappearance on the day of the couple’s wedding anniversary is the backdrop that allows the film to explore issues such as gender roles, the patriarchal abuse of women and the “spectacularisation” of private life in contemporary society. Xan Brooks, writing for The Guardian, describes the film as “a bracing, scalding sketch of a marriage in meltdown” and “a thriller that initially invites us to root for the woman and regard the man as pure evil”. As Brooks’ choice of the word “initially” shows, these expectations are shattered sixty minutes into the film when Amy’s narrative voice bursts into the narrative to tell spectators how she had meticulously planned her own disappearance, planting different clues to incriminate her husband. At that moment the roles victim/perpetrator are reversed. Nick the adulterous husband becomes a victim of Amy, and Amy the innocent victim becomes a manipulative woman that is even willing to kill herself so as to punish her husband. The representation of men as victims and women as manipulative femme fatales is usually traced back to the classical film noir of the 1940s. The figure of the femme fatale in this genre has been analysed as a reflection of male anxieties concerning women’s changing role in society in World War II and post-WWII America (Spicer, 90- 91). Likewise, a spate of 1980s thrillers featuring female characters as ruthless psycho- killers has been linked to the “backlash” against feminism explored by Susan Faludi in her work Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). According to Faludi, a new backlash against U.S. women emerged after the September 11, 2001 1 attacks. As she argues, some specific sectors of the population started to put the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the gains of feminism. According to this discourse, feminism had transformed U.S. men, who had become “soft” because of women’s independence and the change in gender roles (Terror Dream 10). This soft masculinity had turned the U.S. into an easy prey that had proved unable to protect itself from terrorism. Consequently, one of the ways to repair the security breach and make the U.S. “strong” again was to undermine women and feminism (25). The portrayal of Amy Dunne in Gone Girl can be read within the post-9/11 backlash described by Faludi. As will be argued, the film’s specific use of some narrative strategies, in particular the use of two narrators, results in a distinct ideological discourse that demonises the female character and victimises the male one. In order to contextualise this reading of the film within its historical moment, this essay starts with a section on Susan Faludi’s theory of the backlash against independent women and how some of these discourses found their way into the thriller film. The analysis of the film will be divided into two parts. In the first one, special attention will be paid to how the film uses contrasts between past and present scenes together with flashbacks to victimise Amy. In the second part, the analysis will focus on how the film exposes Amy’s plan and her true self in order to demonise her and victimise Nick. Finally, the analysis will move on to explore the ideological implications of these narrative strategies on the construction and portrayal of the female protagonist. 2 2. SUSAN FALUDI AND THE “BACKLASH AGAINST INDEPENDENT WOMEN” In Backlash (1991) Susan Faludi explains that the backlash against women is not an isolated event, but “a recurring phenomenon” that takes place whenever women make “some headway towards equality” (61). She sees the 1980s backlash as a response to some of the gains of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s with respect to women’s reproductive rights and their place in the job market. According to Faludi, the 1980s backlash emerged when some conservative sectors of the U.S. population decided to put an end to the progress of feminism and bring back the ethos of women’s domesticity (11). At the same time, men gradually stopped supporting the women’s movement claiming that gender equality had already been accomplished (74). By the early 1980s and helped by Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of conservatism, the backlash was deeply rooted in U.S. society at large. Its strategy was to divide women and to blame the country’s problems on feminism (14). The media played a key role in indoctrinating women by branding their minds with negative, discouraging ideas about women’s liberation and their newly-attained independence (91). For Faludi, the Hollywood industry actively participated in the spreading of the backlash against women’s independence (Backlash 11). So as to fight against the financial insecurity of the decade, Hollywood created stories that underpinned the patriarchal trends of the 1980s (126). Films reinforced the idea that women’s unhappiness was caused by independence, which was believed to have robbed women of motherhood and marriage, the two things that could make them feel accomplished (126). Positive representations of strong-minded and independent female characters became a glaring absence in the films of the decade. Obliging housewives and mothers 3 became the heroines of cinema, while independent, working women became the villains (129). According to Faludi, these films worked as “morality tales in which the ‘good mother’ wins and the independent woman gets punished”, as is the case of Tender Mercies (dir. Bruce Beresford, 1983), Someone to Watch Over Me (dir. Ridley Scott, 1987) and Moonstruck (dir. Norman Jewison, 1987), in which heroic housewives protect their families against single women preying on their husbands (126, 129). She sees Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1987) as the epitome of the 1980s backlash against women and a filmic validation of some of the myths spread by the media at the time, such as “the man shortage” and “the infertility epidemic” (91). As noted by Faludi, independent female characters in these films undergo what she calls a “reverse metamorphosis”: from empowered women to submissive ones that end up either silent or dead (129). This is the case of Alex in Fatal Attraction, who is murdered, and therefore silenced, by her lover’s wife. With the help of the media and popular culture, Faludi claims, the conservative sectors of the U.S. society managed to prevent the women’s movement from advancing in the 1980s. Almost two decades later, the U.S. media continued to undermine feminist gains. The response of the media to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was to reinstate a backlash against independent women and feminism, as they reached the conclusion that the terrorists’ success was a consequence of the feminisation of the country, which had weakened the U.S. (Faludi, Terror Dream 10). They wanted to recover what Faludi calls “the myth of American invincibility”, which can be traced back to the origins of the U.S. as a nation (281). This myth is rooted in the idea that U.S. women and families are protected by “the virile and vigilant guardians of its frontier” (187). Faludi explains that, in order to cope with the attacks and reinstate the aforementioned myth, Americans 4 went through three phases. In the first one, they turned 9/11 into a “domestic drama” and then into “a problem between the sexes, in which the American man and the nation’s vigour were sapped by female influence” (281). This was solved with “a media and political campaign” that highlighted men’s virility and depicted women as vulnerable damsels in distress. Moreover, the media promoted a reenactment of the cultural and moral values of the fifties, such as family union, domesticated femininity and Cold War hypermasculinity (4). These are the same values on which Reaganite politics and the 1980s backlash were based. Oddly enough, one of the first journalists to capitalise on 9/11 was Peggy Noonan, who happened to be Reagan’s speechwriter (97). In an article for the Wall Street Journal,
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